astrolavista

Bubble Nebula – Wide Angle View

With clouds hanging over the observatory, there is another option. You can process raw images from a remote observatory. Raw images for this project were taken last September from a remote imaging observatory that is located in New Mexico at an elevation of 7400 feet. The telescope was a 106mm Takahashi FSQ 106EDXIII telescope. AContinue reading “Bubble Nebula – Wide Angle View”

Tadpoles – Color

The clouds are moving in, so imaging on this nebula has ended. Three narrow band filters were used and were assigned RGB colors based on what is called the Hubble palette. This was tweaked by removing some of the green coloration while emphasizing blue. A total of 35 thirty minute images were stacked, for aContinue reading “Tadpoles – Color”

Comet Catalina and Arcturus

These two found themselves together on New Years Day, the comet is on the left. This is a 60 second exposure with the 5 inch Astro-Physics Starfire Refractor and a .75 focal reducer.

Tadpoles – Happy New Year

These are the Tadpoles of IC-410. They seem appropriate for the New Year when we are celebrating a fresh start or a new beginning. This emission nebula lies about 12000 light years away, and the Tadpoles are about 10 light years long. This is a stacked composite of 17 half hour h-alpha exposures taken through myContinue reading “Tadpoles – Happy New Year”

Solar Image (2)

For this solar image I used an Imaging Source DMK51AU02.AS video camera. With its large format it can capture the whole sun in a single image with the Lunt Systems 80mm solar refractor. I used a video frame rate of 7.5 frames per second and combined 80% of 2000 images to produce the final image.Continue reading “Solar Image (2)”

Solar Image (1)

This solar image was taken with a dedicated Lunt 80mm solar refractor. Out of 5000 images, 80% were stacked and the resulting final image was inverted and sharpened in Photoshop. The original video was taken with an Imaging Source DMK 21AU618.AS video camera that produced solar images at a rate of 60 frames per second.

Whim, the observatory’s watchdog!

GOT SNOW?

Today on Camp Wood Road

Orion Nebula Work in Progress

This time of year Orion is visible all night long. It rises in the Eastern sky at about 6:30pm, it reaches its highest point at an altitude of about 50 degrees in the Southern sky at around midnight, and it sets in the West at about 6:00 AM. Since it measures a little more thanContinue reading “Orion Nebula Work in Progress”